Silent call at 4.45 am. Grrrrrr......

Buy a callblocker they are worth every penny. They do what they say in the name. Come preprogrammed with 200 numbers and it's very easy to add more.

But how can you add a withheld number? That's the bit that so infuriates me.

You put in the numbers you will accept calls from. If any other number calls, even if it's withheld, the machine answers for you and asks the caller to leave a message, you then get an alert, you can listen to the message and decide if you want to take the call. You can also use a function whereby if you decide you don't want to take the call now or ever the machine politely tells them to piss off!

The original thread about these had a link to a really good demo of the product. I'll have a bit of a hunt.

www.truecall.co.uk/home.aspx

Here's one, there's a good video demo. There are others around, I think if you put "call blockers" into Google you should find a fair few, and a range of prices.

Oh I see, I think I may try that, thanks. I thought it would block my son overseas but I guess I can customise it.

I had to unblock the overseas numbers because they were taken en masse and could not pick out the ones that I wanted to keep. My call blocker came with my BT 4500 (and 3 handsets) which is fairly new.

We use caller ID on our phones....anything that comes up 'International Unavailable' is ignored'. Also our phone allows us to have different ring tones for very close family ....so we know straight away if its one of the children. I also work on the premise that there is no law that states I HAVE to answer my phone......it will register any missed calls and there is also an answerphone for important messages. I think sometimes we are too polite or too deferential. Its a phone, merely a piece of equipment that enables communication.....not a call from a deity.

Years ago when calling my mother the drill was to let it ring twice, then hang up and call again.

When I retired in 2008 we got rid of our landline and we now use only mobiles. My mobile (iPhone) is programmed to only ring audibly for numbers stored in my address book - for everything else it rings silently and I can choose whether to answer it or not.

Witheld numbers really annoy me too. If they don't want me to know who they are, why would I want to speak to them ? Now we do not answer them , if it is important they can leave a message.

HildaW It is strange how we feel we have to answer. The same is true of 'cold callers' at the front door. My friend could not believe I was not answering the door bell as I knew it was someone selling. 'But they can see you are in " she said as we were sitting in the lounge. Not a problem for me , I didn't ask them to call and I don't want to buy anything.

With some telephone systems it is impossible NOT to withhold the number. Years ago I worked on a large holiday resort, part of my job was to call some of the guests and check if there was anything they needed, such as high chairs, stair gates etc. We had to dial "9" to get an outside line, and this resulted in the number I was calling from being withheld

ginny, we do not get cold callers here thankfully, no one can find us but when living near Oxford on a typical housing estate I too would 'choose not to answer my door' when I could clearly see it was someone doing the rounds. Its my home, my front door I choose.....mind you I did think I was a bit odd and perhaps just a bit of a nutter....but am glad to see am not the only one.

Some 'Withheld' numbers a merely from Government depts or Hospital trusts or other large scale operations that do not want you to call back on anything other that the published number so I do not ignore those...its just the International ones.

The calls that really annoy me are the ones that say ' Am I speaking to Mrs G.....' Mrs G had my number before me but that was 10 years ago!! I got one for Mrs G a few days ago. I told the caller that Mrs G hasn't had the number for 10 years & he then said 'Am I speaking to the current owner of Mrs G's address' which isn't my address.

I guess it's a way of getting round TPS but it's very annoying.

I know you can opt to not answer the phone but then I always wonder if it is an emergency - especially in the night.

I suffer with insomnia and on Saturday was having a particularly bad night, around 3.00 a.m. I was just about to finally go to sleep when my mobile rang - a withheld number. I tried to settle down to sleep when it rang again - this time with a voicemail - when I listened it was just someone squealing and giggling. I still have no idea who it was and that night I got no sleep at all. I now switch off my mobile before I go to bed.

On my old mobile phone I kept getting texts from someone's boyfriend who just wouldn't believe he had a wrong number. He seemed to think I was his girlfriend toying with him - even when I pointed out I was a granny! I just gave up in the end and left him to it. I wonder what happened to them both?

When I am in my study I can see the front door on the CCTV monitor, if I do not want to speak to doorstep salesmen I just ignore the bell.
Some people will not take no for an answer rockgran my number is very similar to a takeaway, one night the phone rang four times and I told the man I was not the takeaway and he had dialled the wrong number but he could not grasp the fact, when he rang for the fifth time I took his order

The only calls I sometimes get now in the middle of the night are from my daughter's mobile, which are called 'pocket calls'; what happens is she sleeps with her mobile right next to her [can hardly bear to part with it] and as she is a deep sleeper, turns over in bed, knocks the phone and it rings my number. She has done this a couple of times in the last year.Of course, we can't always assume it's this, so worry, as she lives alone.
Years ago, when our son was at uni, he rang at 2 am [drunk naturally] to say he was chasing a badger down the High St in Southampton!That went down well with us, as you can imagine.

We have calls (about once a day) where we just get a beeping noise. Number withheld obviously, so hard to know who or what this is. Reluctant to discuss with BT because our experience of their "service" leaves something to be desired!
I'll have a look at he callblocker idea - thanks for the suggestion.

harrigran that reminds me; a house we used to live in must have had a similar number to a local pub/restaurant because people were forever calling to ask to book a table, it got quite annoying as we never seemed to be believed by them at first.Sometimes callers would get quite aggrieved, saying 'this is the number I was given'.

Going straight to the answerphone seems to put most of them off ringing again.
I had a call last week from what I thought was the usual incomprehensible asian. I could only pick out one word in three of what he was saying, but after getting him to repeat it several times I finally realised it was an obscene phone call! I thought the idea of making obscene calls to people who can't understand your accent was straight out of Monty Python but I suppose he must have enjoyed it.

I don't know if the silent ones or the 'Am I speaking to...' ones are worse. The middle of the night ones are so scary, rockgran, you always think it is a family disaster.
Which has a campaign on the go to do something about them - sign up cold call campaign here even if you are not a member.

This is on the Ofcom site consumers.ofcom.org.uk/2012/10/abandoned-and-silent-calls/

We get several a day of the bloody things and have to answer because we've got family abroad and my mother's phone is Withheld.

Have you signed-up to the Telephone Preference Service Icy?

Since doing so I get very few nuisance calls, just a persistent overseas silent one a few times a week.

Yesterday, I had a phone call at an ungodly hour from my sister who had ring the wrong number... from New Zealand!